29 Apr, 2018 at 17:55 | Posted in Economics | Comments Off on Respect is not a gift. It is something you have to earn!

Every now and then yours truly gets some upset comments from people wondering why I’m not always respectful of people like Eugene Fama, Robert Lucas, Greg Mankiw, Edward Prescott, Thomas Sargent and others of the same ilk. Here’s a good hint at why it might sometimes be quite appropriate to be disrespectful:

Why can’t I be serious and respectful? Well, the answer is that we’re not having a serious conversation. There are real debates in economics — for example, about how much slack remains in the economy, how effective unconventional monetary policy really is, etc.. For those debates a respectful tone is appropriate. But when people resurrect 80-year-old fallacies, then claim that they never said what they said, then come right back with the same thing, we need colorful language to convey the deep unseriousness of their position.

29 Apr, 2018 at 16:57 | Posted in Varia | Comments Off on Me and Jane Austen in Karlsbad

A couple of years ago, after a hectic week lecturing in Prague and Vienna, yours truly, of course, could not resist the temptation to make a stopover in Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary). It was like walking right into a novel by Jane Austen. Hopefully,​​ I will get time off for a new visit this summer.

A couple of years ago, former chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan, wrote in an article in the Financial Times, re the increased demands for stronger regulation of banks and finance:

Since the devastating Japanese earthquake and, earlier, the global financial tsunami, governments have been pressed to guarantee their populations against virtually all the risks exposed by those extremely low probability events. But should they? Guarantees require the building up of a buffer of idle resources that are not otherwise engaged in the production of goods and services. They are employed only if, and when, the crisis emerges.

The buffer may encompass expensive building materials whose earthquake flexibility is needed for only a minute or two every century, or an extensive stock of vaccines for a feared epidemic that may never occur. Any excess bank equity capital also would constitute a buffer that is not otherwise available to finance productivity-enhancing capital investment.

That is — to say the least — astonishing. Not wanting to take genuine uncertainty or ‘fat tails’ seriously is ominous enough. Is there anything the year 2008 taught us, it is that the ‘tail risks’ are genuinely real and must be included in all financial calculations. But even worse is how someone – who surely ought to have read at least an introductory course in economics – can get the idea that demand for higher capital requirements of banks would be equivalent to building buffers of ‘idle resources.’ The claim is from an economist’s point of view absolute nonsense.

Capital requirements are about how the mix between debt and equity of banks’ balance sheets should look like. It is not a question of something having to be set aside. It is not about liquidity or reserve requirements. Capital requirements are not about pea soup in a jar that we should put on stock to have in a crisis. It’s about how much leverage we should allow banks to have.

Higher capital requirements simply mean that we demand that banks finance a larger portion of their portfolios out of equity and less out of money deposited or loans. There is nothing here about resource use, but about how banks should manage risks. And how they are distributed in an economically efficient manner.

Of course, higher capital requirements mean that banks’ risk-taking decrease. It is precisely because of this the requirements have been instituted. We saw in the recent financial crisis how the ‘systemic risk’ shot up when the banks were found to have taken on too great risks. Financial institutions authorized to operate with high leverage generate negative externalities. Of course, we have to — in the light of the financial crisis — ensure that banks operate under less leverage. Higher capital requirements are one way of achieving this.

Let me illustrate the mechanism.

Suppose a crisis would come and there would be a loss of 1 million USD, and the bank’s own capital is, for example, 5% of the balance sheet, that would force the bank to liquidate assets at a value of 20 million USD to regain the 5% level. Obviously, systems repercussions would be monumental. Higher capital requirements would both reduce the risk of liquidation, and the repercussions would be smaller (20% equity level would, in our example, reduce leverage to 5 million USD).

Suppose the initial balance sheet looks like this:

Loan: 100 Shareholders’ equity: 5
Liabilities: 95

Now if you raise the capital requirement from 5% to 20%, the bank can in principle react in three ways:

In both cases B and C it is evident that the higher capital requirements do not mean that the balance sheet must be reduced. Banks can continue to provide the economy with the necessary loans. Some negative effects on the banks’ ability to perform their basic system functions need not occur because one raises the capital requirements.

This is basics. That a former Federal Reserve chairman does not understand this is, to say the least, disheartening.

But maybe that is how it goes when you prefer reading Ayn Rand to Keynes or Minsky …

28 Apr, 2018 at 10:48 | Posted in Varia | Comments Off on What we do in life echoes in eternity

In science, courage is to follow the motto of enlightenment and Kant’s dictum — Sapere Aude! To use your own understanding, having the ​courage to think for yourself and question ‘received opinion,’ authority or orthodoxy.

In our daily lives, courage is a capability to confront fear, as when in front of the powerful and mighty, not to step back, but stand up for one’s rights not to be humiliated or abused.

As when Rosa Parks sixty-three years ago, on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger.

Courage is to do the right thing in spite of danger and fear.

As when Sir Nicholas Winton organised the rescue of 669 children destined for Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

Or as when Ernest Shackleton, in April 1916, aboard the small boat ‘James Caird’, spent 16 days crossing 1,300 km of ocean to reach South Georgia, then trekked across the island to a whaling station, and finally could rescue the remaining men from the crew of ‘Endurance’ left on the Elephant Island. Not a single member of the expedition died.

Most mainstream economists seem to think the idea behind Modern Monetary Theory is something new that some wild heterodox economic cranks have come up with.

New? Cranks? How about reading one of the great founders of neoclassical economics — Knut Wicksell. This is what Wicksell wrote in 1898 on ‘pure credit systems’ in Interest and Prices (Geldzins und Güterpreise):

It is possible to go even further. There is no real need for any money at all if a payment between two customers can be accomplished by simply transferring the appropriate sum of money in the books of the bank …

A pure credit system has not yet … been completely developed in this form. But here and there it is to be found in the somewhat different guise of the banknote system …

We intend therefor, as a basis for the following discussion, to imagine a state of affairs in which money does not actually circulate at all, neither in the form of coin … nor in the form of notes, but where all domestic payments are effected by means of the Giro system and bookkeeping transfers. A thorough analysis of this purely imaginary case seems to me to be worth while, for it provides a precise antithesis to the equally imaginay case of a pure cash system, in which credit plays no part whatever [the exact equivalent of the often used neoclassical model assumption of ‘cash in advance’ – LPS] …

For the sake of simplicity, let us then assume that the whole monetary system of a country is in the hands of a single credit institution, provided with an adequate number of branches, at which each independent economic individual keeps an account on which he can draw cheques.

What Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) basically does is exactly what Wicksell tried to do more than a hundred years ago. The difference is that today the ‘pure credit economy’ is a reality and not just a theoretical curiosity — MMT describes a fiat currency system that almost every country in the world is operating under.

In modern times legal currencies are totally based on fiat. Currencies no longer have intrinsic value (as gold and silver). What gives them value is basically the simple fact that you have to pay your taxes with them. That also enables governments to run a kind of monopoly business where it never can run out of money. A fortiori, spending becomes the prime mover and taxing and borrowing is degraded to following acts. If we have a depression, the solution, then, is not austerity. It is spending. Budget deficits are not the major problem since fiat money means that governments can always make more of them.

One of the achievements of growth theory was to relate equilibrium growth to asset pricing under tranquil conditions. The hard part of disequilibrium growth is that we do not have — and it may be impossible to have — a​ really good theory of asset valuation under turbulent conditions …

One important tendency in contemporary macroeconomic theory evades this problem in an elegant but (to me) ultimately implausible way. The idea is to imagine that the economy is populated by a single immortal consumer, or a number of identical immortal consumers. The immortality itself is not a problem: each consumer could be replaced by a dynasty, each member of which treats her successors as extensions of herself. But no short-sightedness can be allowed. This consumer does not obey any simple short-run saving function, nor even a stylized Modigliani life-cycle rule of thumb. Instead she, or the dynasty, is supposed to solve an infinite-time utility-maximization problem. That strikes me as far-fetched, but not so awful that one would not want to know where the assumption leads.

The next step is harder to swallow in conjunction with the first. For this consumer every firm is just a transparent instrumentality, an intermediary, a device for carrying out intertemporal optimization subject only to technological constraints and initial endowments. Thus any kind of market failure is ruled out from the beginning, by assumption. There are no strategic complementarities, no coordination failures, no prisoners’ dilemmas.

The end result is a construction in which the whole economy is assumed to be solving a Ramsey optimal-growth problem through time, disturbed only by stationary stochastic shocks to tastes and technology. To these the economy adapts optimally. Inseparable from this habit of thought is the automatic presumption that observed paths are equilibrium paths. So we are asked to regard the construction I have just described as a model of the actual capitalist world. What we used to call business cycles – or at least booms and recessions are now to be interpreted as optimal blips in optimal paths in response to random fluctuations in productivity and the desire for leisure.

I find none of this convincing. The markets for goods and for labor look to me like imperfect pieces of social machinery with important institutional peculiarities. They do not seem to behave at all like transparent and frictionless mechanisms for converting the consumption and leisure desires of households into production and employment decisions. I can not imagine shocks to taste and technology large enough on a quarterly or annual time scale to be responsible for the ups and downs of the business cycle.

Comments Policy

I like comments. Follow netiquette. Comments — especially anonymous ones — with pseudo argumentations, abusive language or irrelevant links will not be posted. And please remember — being a full-time professor leaves only limited time to respond to comments.